Nuzzling into her tangled curls, Simon replied with the trace of a smile in his voice. “No, sweet wife…you won’t be deprived in any way.”

CHAPTER 21

During the two weeks of their honeymoon, Annabelle discovered that she was not nearly as worldly as she had considered herself to be. With a mixture of na?vete and British arrogance, she had always thought of London as the center of all culture and knowledge, but Paris was a revelation. The city was astonishingly modern, making London look like a dowdy country cousin. And yet for all its intellectual and social advancements, the streets of Paris were nearly medieval in appearance; dark, narrow and crooked as they twined through arrondissements of artfully shaped buildings. It was a messy, delightful assault to the senses, with architecture that ranged from the gothic spires of ancient churches to the solid grandeur of the Arc de Triomphe.

Their hotel, the Coeur de Paris, was located on the left bank of the Seine, between a dazzling array of shops on rue de Montparnasse and the covered markets of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where exotic produce and fabrics and laces and art and perfume were displayed in bewildering varieties. The Coeur de Paris was a palace, with suites of rooms that had been designed for sensual pleasure. The bathing room, for example—the salle de bain, it was called—had been fitted with a rosy marble floor and Italian tiled walls, and a gilded rococco settee where the bather rested after the exertions of washing. There was not one but two porcelain tubs, each with its own boiler and cold water tank. The tubs were surmounted with a painted oval landscape on the ceiling, designed to entertain the bather as he or she relaxed. Having been brought up with the British view of a bath as a matter of hygiene to be conducted with expediency, Annabelle was amused by the notion that the act of bathing should be a decadent entertainment.

To Annabelle’s delight, a man and a woman could share a table in a public restaurant without having to request a private dining room. She had never had such delicious food…tender cockerel that had been simmered with tiny onions in red wine…duck confit expertly roasted until it was melting-soft beneath crisp oiled skin…rascasse fish served in thick truffled sauce…then, of course, there were the desserts…thick slices of cake soaked in liqueur and heaped with meringue, and puddings layered with nuts and glaceed fruit. As Simon witnessed Annabelle’s agonized choice of what to order for dessert each night, he assured her gravely that generals had gone to war with far less deliberation than she gave to the choice between the pear tart or the vanilla souffle.

One night Simon took her to a ballet with scandalously underdressed dancers, and the next, a comedy with lewd jokes that needed no translation. They also attended balls and soirees given by acquaintances of Simon’s. Some were French citizens, while others were tourists and emigres from Britain, America, and Italy. A few were stockholders or board members of companies that he had part ownership in, while others had been involved with his shipping or railway enterprises. “How do you know so many people?” Annabelle had asked Simon in bewilderment, when he was hailed by several strangers at the first party they attended.

Simon had laughed and gently mocked that one would think that she had never realized that there was a world outside of the British aristocracy. And the truth was, she hadn’t. She had never thought to look outside the narrow confines of that rarefied society until now. These men, like Simon, were elite in a purely economic sense, actively engaged in building fortunes, many of them literally owning entire towns that had been built around rapidly expanding industries. They possessed mines, plantations, mills, warehouses, stores, and factories; and it seemed that their interests were seldom confined to just one country. While their wives shopped and had gowns made by Parisian dressmakers, the men lounged in cafes or private salons for endless discussions of business and politics. Many of them smoked tobacco in tiny paper tubes called cigarettes, a fashion that had started among Egyptian soldiers and had spread rapidly across the Continent. At dinner, they spoke of things that had never been mentioned in front of Annabelle before, events that she had never heard of and had surely not been reported in the papers.

Annabelle realized that when her husband spoke, the other men paid keen attention to his opinions and sought his advice on a variety of matters. Perhaps Simon was someone of little consequence in the view of the British aristocracy, but it was clear that he wielded considerable influence outside of it. Now she understood why Lord Westcliff held him in such high esteem. The fact was, Simon was a powerful man in his own right. Seeing the respect that others paid him, and noticing the coquettish excitement that he inspired in other women, Annabelle began to see her husband in an altered light. She even began to feel somewhat possessive of him—of Simon!—and found herself beginning to simmer with jealousy when a woman seated next to him at supper tried to monopolize his attention, or when another lady declared flirtatiously that Simon was obligated to partner her for a waltz.

At the first ball they attended, Annabelle stood in an anterior parlor with a group of sophisticated young matrons, one of them the wife of an American munitions maker, the other two Frenchwomen whose husbands were art dealers. Awkwardly fielding their questions about Simon and reluctant to admit how little she still knew about her husband, Annabelle was somewhat relieved when the subject of their conversation appeared to claim her for a dance. Impeccably dressed in a black evening suit, Simon exchanged polite greetings with the laughing, blushing women, and turned to Annabelle. Their gazes locked, while a lovely melody began to play from the nearby ballroom. Annabelle recognized the music…a popular waltz in London, which was so haunting and sweet that the wallflowers had agreed that it was literally torture to sit still in a chair while it was being played.